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And defining a journalist, as the committee did on Thursday, is not a decision for the government to make, several bloggers agreed. Instapundit blogger Glenn Reynolds, a law professor at the University of Tennessee, wrote that “we should protect journalism, not journalists,” while National Review Online’s Michael Walsh said the bill “has nothing to do with protecting journalists, and everything to do with the Government Class protecting itself from those who would expose its activities.”

“Under the guise of ‘protection,’ the Permanent Bipartisan Fusion Party is moving toward its real goal of licensing journalists and creating an American version of Britain’s Official Secrets Act,” he wrote on his blog post for The Corner, “There Ought to Be No Law.”

Morrissey also pushed back against the government making a claim on the definition of a journalist. “if you’re going to have a shield law, and I think that there’s a debate to whether you actually should, then it should protect the process of journalism and not try to define who and what are journalists,” he said.

And The Nation’s Zoë Carpenter knocked the proposed law for its extensive loopholes, particularly pointing to the national security exception. Because of that loophole, Carpenter wrote in a blog post for the liberal magazine, “the law may not shield the reporters who need it most.”

“As written, the Senate bill would not protect journalists if the government could make the case that the information sought would assist in mitigating ‘acts that are reasonably likely to cause significant and articulable harm to national security, a phrase so full of ambiguities as to be essentially useless,” she wrote.

Firedoglake’s Kevin Gosztola pointed out the legislation is “flawed because it should cover all citizens who engage in acts of journalism from being forced to give up their confidential sources.”

Bloggers are not all “dropouts or people who spew hate-filled speech on blogs they purchased for five dollars,” he wrote, and so the perception that giving them “protection would threaten national security and sully the profession of journalism should be challenged.”

“One can only conclude that this version of a shield law is motivated by a bias against bloggers, particularly ‘citizen bloggers.’ These are not ‘professional journalists’ and could not be ‘professional journalists’ in their eyes,” Gosztola wrote. “Yet, I would argue, although they may not be a part of any official press associations or employed by any established media organizations, they may engage in good tradecraft and practice ‘professional journalism’ on a regular basis independently. This may even be something that person does in addition to their job, and they would deserve to enjoy the same additional First Amendment protections as any professional employed journalist.”